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Rajoy denies everything

Spanish prime minister insists before high court that his role in PP has always been purely political and that he was unaware of events related to Gürtel case

The industrial estate in Madrid where the Audiencia Nacional high court’s most peripheral site is located was turned into a bunker yesterday. The reason? Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy was to appear in court to testify in the Gürtel case, the first time that a sitting Spanish prime minister has appeared in court. Rajoy avoided providing the press with a photo on the steps of the court by arriving by car. The head of the Spanish government was also allowed to testify on the same level as the judges, to avoid the image of him next to those accused of corruption in the illegal funding of the PP party. In court, the Spanish prime minister presented himself as a man who had spent 37 years in “politics”, but who knew absolutely nothing about the financial matters of his party. “I never knew about any illegal funding,” he insisted.

During his almost two-hour appearance, Rajoy, who was legally obliged to answer with the truth unlike suspects who might incriminate themselves, said, “I remember everything perfectly well” in relation to the campaigns he headed in the 1990s. Yet, the prime minister maintained that he knew “absolutely” nothing about the party’s financial matters and the allegations of a PP slush fund. “I have never dealt with any issue of finance, my responsibilities are political,” Rajoy said.

When the representative of the Adade lawyers association that had demanded Rajoy’s appearance, José Mariano Benítez de Lugo, pressed the prime minister on the slush fund, he could rely on the aid of former party treasurer Luis Bárcenas’ lawyer, Joaquín Ruiz de Infante, who protested most questions directed at Rajoy, while the head of the court, Ángel Hurtado, declared 14 of the trickier questions posed to Rajoy as “not pertinent”.

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